Nashville Tales

By Louise Littleton Davis

"Another series of fascinating stories. . . . It is flavorful history, well researched." - Tennessee Historical Quarterly "A welcome addition to the folklore of our region. . . .These vignettes about Nashville's early times, chock full of fascinating lore, are written in a readable style." - Nashville Banner "This book should be in the library of anyone who is interested in the history of Nashville." - The Tennessean In Nashville Tales, her third volume of Tennessee historical tales, the author tracks those bold early adventurers who were bent on seeking personal fame and fortune. These courageous, and often flamboyant, individuals carved the modern state along their way. Nashville, the capital of the Volunteer State, has produced its share of adventurers, fortune seekers, builders, and statesmen whose influence still endures today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 1999
• ISBN: 9781455609208

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Also by Louise Littleton Davis

Frontier Tales of Tennessee

More Tales of Tennessee

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Acknowledgments

To John Seigenthaler, president, editor, and publisher of The Tennessean, for permission to publish these stories, all of which appeared originally in The Sunday Magazine of The Tennessean or the Panorama section of that paper.

To the entire staff of the manuscript section of the Tennessee State Library and Archives for their assistance in my search for much of the material.

To the entire staff of The Nashville Room of the Public Library of Nashville and Davidson County for their aid in my search for material.

To countless staff members of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, who have helped trace deeds and land grants, wills and household sales. That includes particularly the office of register of deeds, with much work by Jim Allen.

To the late Stanley F. Horn, for his vast knowledge and enthusiastic assistance in establishing much of Nashville history. To Mrs. Roy C. Avery, for her wealth of genealogical material.

To Harriet C. Owsley, former coeditor of the Andrew Jackson Papers, for her help in directing me to little-known sources for many of these stories.

To Cecil L. Sanford Jr. and the Hillsborough Historical Society of Hillsborough, North Carolina, and to the Orange County Public Library in Hillsborough for assisting me in researching the story on Gen. Francis Nash.

To Dr. Chalmers G. Davidson, of Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina, for aid in researching the story on Gen. William Lee Davidson of Davidson, North Carolina.

Preface

From Gen. Francis Nash who moved from Virginia to seek his fortune in North Carolina in 1763 and Gen. William Lee Davidson who left Pennsylvania as a child about 1748 to become the most completely adored man in North Carolina, Nashville and Davidson County took their names. And these two men who gave their lives in Revolutionary War battles tie this region to the nation's founding.

For no state in the South has had a more varied impact on the nation's history than Tennessee, with its three presidents—Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson—who presided over such divergent eras of warfare and conquest. And no city within Tennessee has so strongly shaped the state's development as Nashville has.

Thus this collection, Nashville Tales, seems the natural outgrowth of two earlier volumes, Frontier Tales of Tennessee (published in 1976) and More Tales of Tennessee (published in 1978). All three are collections of stories that had been published in The Sunday Tennessean Magazine or the Panorama section of The Tennessean, and all the stories in this third volume are aimed at giving readers an intimate view of some of the moments and men who converged to make Nashville a tapestry of courage and color.

From the day James Robertson announced that marauding Indians who murdered his sons would not chase him from the Nashborough fort he had founded, until the last days of his life—spent among the Indians, trying to see that they were treated fairly by the white man—the complexity of the frontier was apparent.

Even venturesome Indian fighter John Rains, who protected early settlers from warring red men, settled down into solid farm life and lived in comfort and even luxury in his last years. His life bridged the gap between frontier terror and quiet prosperity.

And Dr. John Shelby, born in perilous conditions in neighboring Sumner County, added immeasurably to Nashville's social, educational, and professional life after he brought home his M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his bride from fashionable Philadelphia.

But he, like the rest of the medical profession, had his hands tied when epidemics struck in the days before vaccinations and effective drugs. Hundreds of lives were lost here, for instance, when cholera left the city helpless.

All of Nashville suffered for three years during the Civil War when the Union Army occupied the city, and a crucial showdown between North and South came in the Battle of Nashville on December 15 and 16, 1864. In that contest for control of railroads and steamboats that delivered men and supplies to the Union Army, Nashville hills echoed with gunfire for two days, and icy battlefields ran red with the blood of barefoot soldiers.

Little more than 30 years later the city had recovered sufficiently from the grim Reconstruction years to host Nashville's biggest party—a six-month celebration of Tennessee's 100th birthday. The impact of that celebration is strongly felt in Nashville civic and social life today.

These and other stories are compiled in the hope that they will bring readers an insight into some of the triumphs and tribulations, the high courage and joyous adventure that have formed the city of Nashville.

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Gen. Francis Nash Gave the City His Name

The exuberant Francis Nash, when he arrived in Hillsborough, North Carolina, near his twenty-first birthday, was so human, so handsome, so full of plans in business and law and politics, that no one has been able to sort all of them out.

There were romances, sad and joyful. And there were fierce stands to take, and honors and embarrassments—in both public and private life.

The fact that Nashville, Tennessee, and Nash County, North Carolina, were named in his honor shortly after the young man's death over two hundred years ago is some measure of his hold on the affection of his home state and the new nation.

The fact that a plaque honoring him was unveiled recently at the United States Military Academy at West Point indicates new interest in that charmed life. And Nash seems close when one stands in the graceful parlor of the tall frame mansion house he built on a choice site in Hillsborough in 1772. The lawns where he walked, the boxwood-bordered circular drive where he used to dash up on the fine horses he loved, are reminders of the elegance he enjoyed.

On a recent visit to Hillsborough—that cradle of Middle Tennessee—I retraced the scenes where Nash took part in some of the most dramatic action in this country's struggle for freedom.

Just to enter Hillsborough—where, in many ways, Nashville had its beginning—is to step back over two hundred years in history. Located in the piedmont area of North Carolina, about twelve miles from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and about twelve miles from Duke University at Durham, Hillsborough has been so powerful in both pre-Revolution and post-Revolution North Carolina that it was long considered the logical location for the capital.

The names of the place and its streets tell of its ancient ties. Hillsborough itself was named for the Earl of Hillsborough, British secretary of state for the colonies under George III. And Hillsborough is county seat for Orange County, so named to honor William III, of the House of Orange, ruler of England from 1689 to 1702.

The names of Hillsborough streets, where Lord Cornwallis paraded his troops and freedom-loving men defied them, echo the era: King Street, a main thoroughfare running west to east and once the scene of angry demonstrations for justice; Queen Street, a quiet way of handsome homes; Tryon Street, named for one of the influential colonial governors, and more.

But when aristocratic Nash rode into Hillsborough in 1763 to make his home, it was still a backwoods town of log houses and taverns, and a small frame courthouse stood on the same spot where the 1844 courthouse stands today.

Nash, born in 1742 at his father's Templeton Manor plantation in Prince Edward County, Virginia, was fourth son of the wealthy John Nash, a power in Virginia government and education. John Nash, in turn, had come to this country from his native Wales after marrying Anne, daughter of Sir Hugh Owen, of equally distinguished Welsh fam

Francis Nash was the youngest of the four sons, and he had apparently come to Hillsborough along with his older brother, Abner Nash—a lawyer who was to become governor of North Carolina. Abner Nash was in fact governor when the first settlers arrived on the Cumberland to found what is now Nashville.

And Abner Nash was so highly regarded in national affairs that his death in 1786 at age forty-three, while he was serving in Congress (then seated in New York), was occasion for one of the memorable funeral processions of that era. Not only did the cabinet and the supreme court attend the services at St. Paul's Church, but most of the ambassadors from Europe were also there.

It was Abner as well as Francis Nash who bought a great deal of property in Hillsborough, and operated a mill down by the little Eno River that runs by the town. Young Francis Nash—affable, trained as a lawyer, graceful in manner— rose quickly in public office and was soon appointed to one of the most lucrative jobs in the colonies: clerk to the Superior Court of Orange County.

As it turned out, that job put him under suspicion from small farmers who were brutally oppressed by every county officeholder from sheriff to register. And the fact that he was law partner and friend to Edmund Fanning, county register and most hated man in Orange, turned suspicious eyes toward Nash.

Fanning, a native New Yorker and Yale graduate whose arrogant way of crushing farmers to fill his own pocket fanned the fires of revolution, somehow maintained his friendship with Nash for a while.

Fanning's lavish living, the fine home he built on King Street, across the street from where the 200-year-old Colonial Inn stands today, incensed farmers struggling to pay their taxes.

Orange County then included what is now five more counties and parts of six others, and farmers from that vast territory organized themselves into a powerful group they called the Regulators. After long efforts at justice, mobs of them crowded into the courtroom in Hillsborough on September 24, 1768, and literally beat up and chased out of the courthouse every officeholder from sheriff to register and every lawyer in the building.

Judge Richard Henderson, who was later to organize the first band of settlers to come west and settle what is now Nashville, was presiding over court that morning, and he escaped the mob only because he promised to hold court until the end of the term. (He broke that promise, and the Regulators later burned his home and stable to the ground.)

But the mob in the courtroom made a lunge for the hated Fanning, and when he darted to the judge's bench for protection, they dragged him out by the heels and mauled him with clubs until he wrestled loose and fled to a nearby store. There they broke the windows and pounded him with stones.

They burned Fanning's house and all his belongings. Eventually Fanning went to England to make his home. Nash escaped the courthouse mob in all of the confusion, and when an investigation of wrongdoing was made, he was found not guilty.

When Governor Tryon ordered the militia to Hillsborough to quell the Regulators, Capt. Francis Nash was chosen to command the Hillsborough militiamen. And when the showdown came at the Battle of the Alamance on May 16, 1771, the poorly equipped Regulators were soundly defeated.

But there were brave men fighting there, and when six of the survivors were hanged for their part in the uprising, local patriots were haunted by the words of one of the men, just before the noose was fitted around his neck: The blood that we have shed will be as good seed sown in good ground, which will soon reap a hundredfold.

Out of that discontent, a great migration westward took shape. Richard Henderson, ruined in Hillsborough, negotiated with the Indians to buy much of the territory that is now Kentucky and Tennessee. He engaged Daniel Boone and James Robertson to lead parties westward to settle the new land.

And Henderson, who eventually set up a real estate office near Nashville and drew up the Cumberland Compact to govern this area, was apparently the man who named the little fort on the Cumberland for his good friend in Hillsborough, Francis Nash.

For Nash, the man for whom Nashville was named, had died a popular hero on George Washington's staff long before the Nashville area was settled.

There was no conflict, in his mind, in his fighting against the Regulators at the Battle of the Alamance and against the British oppression during the Revolution. At the Alamance, he was fighting against lawlessness and terrorism, as he saw it. In the Revolution, he was fighting for freedom for all Americans.

Few of his private papers are left, and of those remaining most concern military movements during the Revolutionary War. But it is known that he married in 1770, in the midst of the Regulator troubles, and that marriage allied him with one of the prominent families of North Carolina.

His bride, Sarah Moore, was daughter of Judge Maurice Moore of Wilmington, North Carolina, and sister of Supreme Court Justice Alfred Moore. When Nash was courting Sarah, he wrote a friend, asking if he could borrow a fine horse that matched Nash's own mount. He wanted to impress the girl with the matching pair. But courtship was no problem for Francis Nash, described by friends as handsome in person, easy and graceful and gentle in manners, energetic and thorough in all that he undertook.

Known as a builder in Hillsborough, Nash joined his brother Abner in operating a mill on the Eno. And Francis Nash, in addition to practicing law and dealing in real estate, was for a time partner in a mercantile business there.

He held many public offices, and was apparently active in the Episcopal church, which was then next door to the site of the home he built on Tryon Street. He took a leading part in the social, industrial and political life of Hillsborough, a center of power in North Carolina.

Nash was, according to one historian, perhaps the most attractive character of Colonial and Revolutionary Hillsborough, and that was a time when lawyers and educators and state leaders flocked to that town.

The exact date of his marriage (in 1770) is not known, but it is known that one of his two children, Ann, died as a child, and the other daughter, Sarah, grew up to marry John Waddell, a wealthy rice planter on the lower Cape Fear River. (A century later, their grandson, James Iredell Waddell, commanded the Confederate ship Shenandoah, the last unit of the Confederacy to fly the Confederate flag.)

Nash had married Sarah Moore in the midst of the trouble with the Regulators, and less than a year after that uprising was settled he bought the land where his house stands today. On March 21, 1772, Orange County records show, Nash bought a row of lots that totaled eight acres and covered a gentle slope rising above historic Tryon Street.

That same year he built the tall, two-story white frame house that rises above a sturdy brick basement and includes ten rooms, each with its own fireplace. The handsome floors—all original and in excellent condition today—are level and without a squeak. The graceful proportions of windows and rooms make it a home of dignity and charm.

The richly landscaped grounds, covering three acres today, include rare old trees and flowers, lovingly cared for by the present owners, Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Sanford, Jr.

It was in that home that Nash was living when he plunged into the action that helped lead the nation into the Revolutionary War. He was a member of the second and third Provincial congresses, which met in April and August, 1775, to express opposition to British oppression.

The August meeting was held at the old St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, just down the street from Nash's home. And at that meeting, which included some of the great men in colonial history, Francis Nash was elected lieutenant colonel in the North Carolina Regiment of the Continental Army.

And Nash knew that, taking that stand, he was considered a traitor by the British. Moreover, he had troubles in his private life. Court records show that he had two illegitimate children, one of them by Ruthie Jackson, daughter of Philip Jackson, the gentlemanly keeper of Faddis Tavern, where Ruthie was a bar maid.

Faddis Tavern, famed colonial hotel across the street from the courthouse, was the place that Lord Cornwallis stayed part of the time he was in Hillsborough. When pretty Ruthie Jackson bore Nash's daughter, he provided generously for them, deeding to Ruthie a plantation called Witty's Place, west of Hillsborough, and several slaves for the care of the place.

Records of the other illegitimate child are missing.

By February, 1776, Nash and his men were kept on the move up and down the Atlantic coast, trying to meet the changing strategy of British forces under Cornwallis.

After wearying marches through tropic bogs and winter snows, Nash and his men were back near St. Augustine, Florida, on February 5, 1777, when Nash was promoted to brigadier general.

He was popular with the men under his command, and highly valued by Gen. George Washington. The latter ordered them north again in the spring of 1777 to help beat the British